Monday, March 13, 2017

Blogging:The Alcohol Edition

The blog has recently taken a back seat due to the vast amount of homework I have for this quarter. I decided to bite the bullet and take two classes at once. Sadly I picked two of the busiest busywork classes to take together. I don’t know how people do it. I am keeping up by the skin of my teeth but it takes every spare moment of time. And what is the end point? I have a Masters Degree that will likely amount to nothing. But at least I’ll have it, I guess. It’s times like right this very minute I just want to stop. After this I have one more class over the summer then the fall I am taking off. I plan to do a practicum over the winter but of course I have no idea what that will be. I don’t seem to have the networks at Mayo to find a good project to latch onto. I guess I have time. I need to get the request in by the end of the summer, but should really have it done by mid summer and there’s quite a bit to it. Oh well. Deep breath. It will get done eventually.

Oh, and did I mention that I got a new camera and I can upload photos to my phone which then uploads them to the cloud. However, to get them into this little blog I have to download them to a file and they aren’t in order and it takes a while to do. Sadly, my external hard drive is no longer compatible with my crappy Dell and it’s crappy Windows 10 so blogging just got a whole lot more complicated. But I think I’ve got the pictures I need, for the moment anyway.

Before I lost my mind and had a little extra time I went to Stitches West. Oddly, most of my pictures are like a diary of all the drinks I had. A history of Stitches, 2017, in alcohol.

Before I left though, I had a little celebration with my best bud Cathy--

And Dave and I took a walk—

It was about 63 when I left on Tuesday, 02/21, and was about 40ish when I got to Seattle. I spent the night with Martha. We had a little walk Wednesday in the AM.

We met up with Julie later in the AM and flew off to San Jose. The hills were very green there.

This is Julie and Martha and Me after our registration and check in Wednesday night. We really did the right thing by getting there a day earlier this year.

We decided that perhaps an adult beverage was needed before dinner. Lo and behold it was Margarita day—well, of course a round was had by all. Best Margarita I ever had. Mango it was and it was delish.

We went out to dinner at a crowded pub at Levi Stadium. Note to self, will never return to a lace that charges 5 dollars per glass of club soda. Only in Cali.

Next up—some beers!

And desert!

The next day, opening day, we went to the keynote speaker, Franklin Habit. He was really good.

And the luncheon and off to my first class, which was weaving.

We went to the opening day of the Market and I bought this---

Yes, I go to the yarn market and buy moisturizer.It’s leaping bunny approved! I also bought body powder.

And when we were done there we had our obligatory glass of Champers!!

We were tired after that so we went to bed and the next day we had our continental knitting class. Both Martha and I took that one. It was a different type of continental knitting and the teacher, Candice Eisner Strick was the best. She’s so funny. I’m not sure we had time to walk that morning, but we did take a couple of nice morning walks on Thursday.

The greenness of a LOT of rain in Cali.

Weird Shadow People

Ground Zero

And a shadowy selfie in the sun.

Another trip to the Market. I was pretty good about limiting my purchases. I’m not sure I bought much of anything—no wait, I did buy some yarn for a tee shirt. And some other yarn I put away for another project.

We took an afternoon break—Sangria on sale….

We had to get done early to get in line for the fashion show at 6:30, which didn’t start till 7ish. I have some pictures but they have to upload to my computer cause I didn’t transfer them to my camera. This is getting to be super time consuming.

Here we go--

We had a wine and pizza party afterwards with our friends from the 2 Knit Lit Chick podcast, Barb and Tracie. Complete with Girl Scout Cookies

We also met up with other friends, Kathy and Debra-

Love all these girls!!

The next day we went to the market once more cause Barb and Tracie turned me onto this sweet yarn—benefitting Planned Parenthood

Click to embiggen.

We flew home and because we traded seats three times to let families sit together I got a free glass of wine. Of course I did.

Knitting and wine…

And the next day, Sunday, I flew back to MN to see the foot of snow that fell while I was gone. (Did I mention it was in the 60’s when I left??)

Rainy day in Seattle

But my Bloody Mary helped ease the pain

Snow in MN

I started school immediately and haven’t really stopped to breath except to celebrate my birthday--

I found some Insight Beer in Rochester—yayayayay.

Celebratory Bar Crawl.

Last Friday, which is actually three days ago, we travelled up to Grand Forks to visit with Blane and Melanie. It’s the yearly birthday trip since her birthday is March 7th.

Daube’s says Happy Birthday to us!

We also took some seriously bad selfies cause we can NEVER get it right.

I guess this is the best one….

There’s a mystery picture of me and Melanie holding the cake but we don’t seem to have that picture anywhere.

Here’s Blane and Melanie

Supporting the company on the off time

We had to leave a day early, Sunday, cause it was going to snow and we wanted to miss that event.

Me and Blane saying good bye--

It was cold there, and we lost an hour of time. Jeepers I hate that. But we missed the snow by an hour which was good. We got home at 1:20 and it started snowing at 2:30ish and we got another 6 or so inches. Oh well.

In other news, I got my chair recovered--

Before

After--

I think it looks pretty good. Here it is visiting with the other furniture--

Yes, that’s the old back sitting on the ottoman. The reupholsterer saved it for me.

So I’m trying not to be too stressed out by all the crap I have to do at home, at work, and for school….cleansing breath. I am doing the one day at a time and taking a cue from the cats--